U-T Editorial: The CTA's gamble

Sales tax hike a harder sell than union thinks

With the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger prepared to make actual hard-dollar cuts in education spending, the California Teachers Association is flexing its muscle. CTA leaders say that if lawmakers don't back off, they are ready to begin a signature-gathering campaign for a ballot initiative to raise the state sales tax by a penny to provide an additional $5 billion to $6 billion a year to public schools.

We encourage state leaders to ignore this threat by the teachers union and do what they must. Meanwhile, we have not a warning but a suggestion for the CTA: Be careful. Your initiative is likely to become a referendum on the education status quo – and for all your swagger, you might not like the public's verdict.

Our growing confidence that the public no longer buys the CTA's propaganda may be misguided. The CTA's reflexive insistence that all it does is “fight for the kids” has long been accepted uncritically by too many parents. But in the battle between California's two dueling education narratives – the CTA view that school quality is a function of school spending and the reform view that more spending is akin to throwing good money after bad – the reformers are winning.

On an anecdotal level, this seems increasingly evident. Older Californians look back to a time when schools had far fewer resources (and lower-paid teachers) and wonder why their kids' schools struggle. Californians of all ages dislike the roadblocks local unions throw up to cheaper, often-better charter schools.

On an academic level, the triumph of reformers is indisputable. The omnibus 2007 Stanford studies of California schools – the most thorough study ever made of a state public school system – demolished the idea that more money means better schools. Instead, there were good schools in poor districts and bad schools in rich districts, and little understanding in general as to why.

Meanwhile, other research has shown that the inept teachers protected by California's tenure system can cut their students' educational progress by a half-year per year of schooling – a stunning finding.

Against this backdrop, any confidence the CTA has that Californians would heed its arguments and raise their already-high sales tax rate is hard to understand. This is especially so given the language of the CTA's initiative, which essentially would reserve all of the billions it would raise for employee compensation – meaning make-work “categorical” jobs would keep their funding and raises would still be granted no matter a teacher's job performance.

This is not a minor detail. Instead, it is the starkest confirmation yet that the California Teachers Association sees the state public school system as a jobs bank, first and foremost.

This is the status quo that the CTA wants Californians to embrace. Instead, it must be buried – and a good first step would be a landslide rejection of a school sales tax.